Software developer Dick Lucas is running for California State Assembly to fix housing and break one-party dominance

Summary

Dick Lucas, a software developer and Android engineer turned agency co-founder, is running as a Republican challenger for California's 51st State Assembly District, covering Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, and parts of Hollywood. The primary is June 2026. His campaign went viral on July 15, 2025, the same day he appeared on the podcast.

Lucas frames his candidacy around competitive failure in single-party governance rather than pure ideology. California's legislature has 80 Assembly members and 40 state senators, and Lucas argues the absence of meaningful opposition has allowed institutional rot to compound unchecked. The January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires are his galvanizing event. The Saenz Reservoir serving the Palisades was offline for eight months before the fires; when he pressed a state senator on the failure, the response was that it was unclear how much it would have helped. That exchange, he says, confirmed the system was too closed to even process accountability.

Policy Priorities

• Housing supply is his lead issue. California housing costs run at 100% of the national average. Lucas points to recent Democratic legislation passed around July 3rd that purports to ease construction near transit corridors but runs to 30 pages and is difficult to parse. His position is simpler permitting, not rent freezes. He cites Austin as evidence that supply expansion can drive rents down rather than merely stabilize them.
• Gas prices are a secondary target. California is a top-eight oil-producing state yet carries the highest gasoline prices in the country, a gap he attributes largely to state taxes and refinery regulations rather than supply-demand dynamics alone.
• His broader framework treats policy as an empirical problem: 50 state experiments are running simultaneously, and the task is identifying what works and replicating it.

Campaign mechanics

Lucas is self-funding at the early stage and not yet accepting donations. His district has roughly 490,000 eligible voters. His strategy combines viral social distribution, primarily on X, with traditional door-knocking. He is running the campaign while continuing to operate his software agency and expecting a child in November 2025, which puts a hard constraint on bandwidth before the June primary.

The candidate's pitch to the tech community is direct: the pipeline of capable, builder-class candidates into local politics is nearly empty, and the vacuum is being filled by career organizers and lawyers with no track record of creating jobs or products. He argues that is a correctable problem if high-agency people treat local office the way they treat early-stage startups, as an undercompeted market with asymmetric upside.